MAP

What if we threw it all away? (K12 tech infrastructure)

May 11, 2006 — Clint Kennedy

I have been having an especially frustrating day with my district's technology infrastructure so take all of this with a grain of salt…

What if we threw it all out and started over? What if we relied on students buying their own laptops (subsidized with built in scholarship by the district) and thus outsource the maintenance headaches? What if we gave a basic description of what students should have/need to be prepared for school (like many colleges)? What if we leveraged the many free and open source technologies to replace what we are trying to re-create/buy for our schools? Hang some wifi access points connected to fiber connected to leased lines and let students have at it. Setup printing kiosks (main terminals connected to a dedicated printer) and provide multimedia projectors. What would the total cost be for this alternative as opposed to what we are doing now? Outsource the purchasing decisions to families. Outsource the support of the end user devices to the computer companies. Outsource the software and services to the companies making them. Use your existing staff to provide a bare-bones infrastructure and have them help integrate and suggest solutions that students can go find (and of course admin and teacher machines). Isn't this the constructivists approach to educational technology??? How would we do it? I think this would be a great unconference topic….